Farewell national parks road trip

Well as the title of this post goes, the national parks road trip has come to an end. Tomorrow it’s a driving day back down to Salt Lake City for the night before a flight out to Chicago the following morning.

In just over 2 weeks approx 2500 miles have been driven across 6 states visiting 5 national parks, an epic journey of sorts up crazy 12 lane interstates to quiet country highways. Parks were explored, trails hiked and animals spotted roaming the lands. Hopefully sometime in the future I can come back and do another road trip through some of the other 385 51 (correction: there are 392 national parks, but some of these are monuments or special areas like DC, only 58 exist in the sense of the ones I visit) national parks in the US.

If I had to choose which park I enjoyed the most it would actually be quite hard. I enjoyed every park visited as each was quite different to the next and also because they all had awesome geological backstories (if I wasn’t a computer person, I’m pretty sure I’d be doing something earth science related). But depending on what kind of trip person you are I’m sure some parks might not be everyone’s cup of tea (e.g. Grand Canyon NP is on the bottom of my list). That said on this trip I think I’d have to rate Arches as my fave closely followed by Yellowstone. Which is somewhat surprising as on first look Arches appears as a very uninviting place, a desert environment with rock in parts of it. But when you get out an explore it, there’s heaps of things to be seen and done.

As for Yellowstone, if you’ve got any fascination with volcanoes or earthquakes it’s the place to come visit. I would’ve loved to come here back when I was in Year 11/12 studying volcanoes and tectonic plates. The visitor education centres are brilliantly done and getting to see the earth’s forces at work is impressive. Plus animal spotting is a given here… don’t think there was a single day without seeing an animal… on which today spotted a coyote and some other animal that was not an elk (or bison)!